Port multipliers and other device multiplexing mechanisms allow a single port to be used for communicating with multiple devices, such as memory drives or peripheral devices. A port multiplier may allow cost-effective scalability in multi-device systems. If any errors are detected in transmission from any one of the devices to the port multiplier, for example, using cyclic redundancy check (CRC), the port multiplier is required to report such errors to the host controller. However, the standard does not provide for the port multiplier to report or differentiate to the host controller which device produced the error. Thus, typically, when an error is detected, either all devices attached to the port multiplier may be reset, or the status of the connected devices must be separately queried.
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